Usher opened The Roast of Kevin Hart on Sunday night and immediately set the tone for the entire evening. Dressed in a double breasted white jacket over a brown shirt and slacks, with The Roots serving as the house band behind him, Usher walked out and started singing his 2004 “Confessions” classic “Burn” with the lyrics completely rewritten to roast the man of the hour. Kevin Hart was not ready.
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Kevin’s first reaction said everything. As soon as it clicked that Usher was not there to perform the original, Hart stood up and asked “what the f**k are you doing?” The crowd at the Kia Forum in Inglewood started losing it. Usher kept going.The flipped lyrics did real damage. Usher targeted Kevin’s recent stretch of films, the gap between his stand up reputation and his current output, and the way the money has changed the work. The line that has been clipped and replayed the most online is the one about watching what the money did to him. Another standout was a swap on the chorus about how Kevin’s jokes are not cracking like they used to. Usher closed the performance by looking at Kevin and telling him he was going to need some good luck to get through the rest of the night. He was not wrong.
The performance worked because it was unexpected. Usher and Kevin Hart have been friends and have played off each other in interviews and on red carpets for years, and the assumption walking into the night was that Ush was going to deliver a straight serenade as a soft opening before the comedians took the gloves off. Instead Usher delivered the first roast of the night, set the energy for the next three hours, and walked off having out comedy starred half the dais.Musically it was also a flex. Usher took one of the most recognizable R&B records of the 2000s and rewrote it on the fly for a live Netflix event, with The Roots backing him in real time. There is a reason this man is preparing to head out on tour with Chris Brown for the R&B Tour this summer. The voice is still in pristine condition, and his sense of timing is sharper than several of the actual comedians who took the stage after him.
Kevin recovered, hosted the rest of his own roast, and ended the night hugging Katt Williams in an actual reconciliation moment. But the headline he woke up to on Monday was Usher. The clip is already one of the most replayed moments of the entire Netflix is a Joke Fest, and the parody is one of the rare roast bits that doubles as a genuinely listenable record. If Usher dropped a studio version of this on streaming tomorrow, the algorithm would eat.
